Electronic commerce on the Internet is a booming business model. Many e-commerce Internet businesses rely on advertising revenues as an important part of their revenue model. A vast majority of the Internet e-commerce sites rely on banner ads as the primary form of advertising at their sites. The present invention discloses an improvement over existing advertising models by disclosing a method and apparatus which enables e-commerce operators to deliver advertising to web site visitors and users by electronically embedding advertisements in computer files, such audio files, downloaded by the web site users. This invention causes the web site user (or the ultimate end user) to hear and/or see the advertisement as part of the file downloaded by the user.
In the prior art inserting advertising onto the users computer during downloading of a web page is disclosed by Judson U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,732,619 and 5,572,643. Advertising inserted into a home banking transaction is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,870,724. Advertising inserted into applications is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,819,092. Perkowski, U.S. Pat. No. 5,950,173 discloses a system and method for delivering consumer product related information to consumers within retail environments using internet-based information servers and sales agents. Hobbs, U.S. Pat. No. 5,987,454 discloses a method and apparatus for selectively augmenting retrieved text, numbers, maps, charts, still pictures and/or graphics, moving pictures and/or graphics and audio information from a network resource. Picco et al U.S. Pat. No. 6,029,045 discloses a system and method for inserting local content into programming content. Heckel, U.S. Pat. No. 6,036,601 discloses a method for advertising over a computer network utilizing virtual environments of games. None of these references suggest the advantage of providing a downloadable audio file having inserted therein a second message such as an advertisement.